"Like Kurosawa I make mad films"

Ten things I learned from reading the Aeneid:

1. If you whinge every step of the way but still do the work,* you too can be immortalized as a pious national hero.
   
   
2. Dido is a shotacon perv. She may rationalize fondling and sleeping with ten-year-old Ascanius** as a substitute for his inaccessible father, but really, it's creepy.
   
   
3. Camilla apparently studied wire-fu at a Hong Kong temple, where she learned how to run over stalks of grain without bending them and fight two men at once with flying kicks.
   
   
4. I can think of few births more disorienting that being transformed from a ship into a nymph. Even if it's with your fleet-sisters.
   
   
5. Virgil's strong suit was not internal struggles with strong desire. (Someone should hire Ovid for a ghost rewrite of book IV.)
   
   
6. Nor were transitions.
   
   
7. Nor women.*** In fact, if you're a female character, avoid at all costs being cast in a work by Virgil.
   
   
8. He was, however, good at pacing and rhythm and bits of Cool Shit (see 3 & 4).
   
   
9. While it's not clear whether replacing anyone with a ninja would improve the story, Aeneas would be much more interesting as a samurai -- say, the leader of a band of ronin. Preferably played by Toshiro Mifune.
   
   
10. Fifth time's the charm.

And now I can stop trying to read it, because I finally have.


* Yes, Aeneas whinges much less in the second half, but this can be attributed almost entirely to the fact that he's hardly ever on stage -- and when he is, he's too busy fighting a war. I was amused by a moment when he starts grumping but is interrupted by Mom before he can, as it were, get up a full spleen of steam.

** Actually, Ascanius's age confuses me -- he seems to waver from about ten to his mid-teens. I may have missed a detail that nailed it more exactly. At the time Dido held him in her lap, I had him pegged as ten.

*** Virgil's are all either paragons or raving psychobitches, and available data suggests he thought the former a developmental stage leading to the latter. Camilla is the exception, and she's undone by "a female's love of plunder and of spoils."

---L.